There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace
and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of
pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a
result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are
all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is
now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of
the environment.

Just as organic food is its communion, that
pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs,
imbibe.

… Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the
environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving
systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who
are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief
system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for
example managing national parks, is humiliating.

Our fifty-year effort
at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which
our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in
the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying
various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded
about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible
about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.

S.T. Karnick, writing in The Weekly Standard, comes closest to making sense of Crichton’s life and work:

To some extent Crichton’s writings reflected an attitude
of scientism in its totalizing sense, the fallacious assumption that
nothing not readily explainable by science is true. In a book such as Congo,
for example, there is a strong implication that human beings are not
unique in this creation and thus not intrinsically of greater
importance than other creatures. That line of thinking actually
contradicts the warm feelings toward humanity that are necessary to
justify his and the reader’s concern for the characters.

Fortunately, that sort of scientism is usually not too annoyingly
evident in his works. Very much on the positive side, in addition, was
his crusade in recent years to tell the truth about global warming:
Crichton was insistent that there is no manmade global warming crisis
facing us today. In speeches, articles, and his excellent potboiler
novel State of Fear, he not only refuted the scientific and economic
assertions of global-warming alarmists but also, and perhaps more
importantly in cultural terms, pointed out their real motivation for
pursuing their agenda: money.